My second computer - my first was a Tandy 1000 with 384K (later upgraded to 640K), 2 360K floppy drives, and the whole vintage 1987 kit that came with it.
I was probably about 15 (circa 97' or so) when I started technically because it all started with a family friend who gave us a ZEOS 386/486 Upgradable Systems Mainboard with the promise that I got my grades up he would build out a decent Windows 95 based 486 PC for me to surf the web and do things with. Well, this guy and the family parted ways, and left the motherboard in our Kitchen cabinet.
For about 2-3 years that ZEOS motherboard sat up there, mocking me, taunting me, some nights I would pull it down and just look at it! - Here's a picture of one just like it. - http://www.ebay.ie/itm/Motherboard-ZEOS-with- … r-/162210038167
Finally by age 17, I'd had enough, I figured, "well crap, I can build a guitar, I might as well try my hand at building a computer".
By this point it was 2000, so I started scrounging the junk piles near my house for cases, power supplies, and components. What I started off doing was grabbing 2 monitors from across the street, big mistake, one of them was a mac monitor that DID work but starts smelling like burning coffee and showing scrolling horizontal bars and a happyface at the bottom. The other was a completely dead 17" CRT.
Unable to find an AT class chassis for the ZEOS board, I decided to take it my own way, I got my hands on a Packard Bell 386 bottom half, and a Packard Bell 486 top cover, I hack-sawed and Dremeled until one could literally use ISA cards in it in the standard AT configuration. Sure enough it did work, save for the lack of a display card.
However, as luck would have it the metal band I was in at the time......our rhythm guitarist's dad was a Military lawyer and former computer tech who had some old (now vintage) machines kicking around, and he gave me, out of the blue, a 386 SX just around the time of my birthday. Branded "Flight 386 SX" with an Addonics MON-7C4B 14" Color VGA monitor and a Chicony 8551 101 Key Keyboard with Alps Keyswitches.
I used the Flight for about a week, pondering about the 486 board in the Packard Bell case and decided to go and do it. At this point the PC had THESE Specs...
CASE: Kingspao Model 35 Chassis
PSU: Hi-Pot 230 Watt Baby-AT PSU
MoBo: Unknown 386 SX-25 system board
CPU: PLCC 386 SX-25 soldered right to the board
CoPro: NONE
RAM: 5MB
FDD 0: 1.2MB TEAC 5.25"'
FDD 1: 1.44MB Mitsumi 3.5"
HDD: Maxtor 7120AT 124MB IDE HDD (CHS is 936 16 17 - I dunno HOW I still remember that)
GFX: Western Digital PVGA1A ISA VGA card
SND: INternal Speaker
NET: None
O/S: MS-DOS 5.0
The following Sunday, I took the whole machine apart, and took to installing that 486 motherboard. It took about 3-4 hours, and after that time I could not get the damned thing to POST to save my life. It wound up being just ONE thing wrong and that's that I had the IDE cable backward. Once I flipped that around - the chain reaction of part additions started, I needed a new CMOS battery because the old board used a soldered-on rechargeable, and this thing needed one of those black/white lithium cell brick things, usually sold by Tadiran. It took me quite some time before I got it all ironed out but by July I was given $150 and permission to sign up for AOL....this was the end specs of the machine
CASE/PSU: The Same
MoBo: Zeos Upgradeable Systems Mainboard w/ 486 daughtercard
CPU: Intel 80486 DX-33
RAM: 8MB
DRIVES: The Same
GFX: The Same
SND: ESS AudioDrive 1869
NET: US Robotics External Faxmodem
O/S: MS-DOS 5.0/Windows 3.1
INTERNET/BROWSER: AOL 3.0/AOL 4.0 with IE integrated into it
I had this computer a very long time, until about 2012 when I decided to let it go to someone else because I was no longer using it much anymore. At that point I'd upgraded it to an AMD K-6 and had an MSI PCI video card in it running Windows 2000. Kind of regret getting it of it because I would love to have had the case to put my 486 system into now. Live and learn. It was kind of falling apart though from all the case mods done to keep adding more stuff to it - we're talking things akin to so many hard disks I had to double-stick tape them to the power supply, and cutting the drive cage so the thermal unit would fit. Adding 2 more LED lights during it's final 486 incarnation so I could have individual indicators off the Future Domain PowerIDE dual IDE controller I had in it (at it's strongest, it had 4 hard disks, CD-ROM, and 2 Floppies). I called it the IRQ challenge during that time because I literally had to make a written-out table of memory addresses and interrupts to get all 8 expansion cards working in it - and I did.